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Fixes for a floating point bug affecting PHP on 32-bit systems have been published, the PHP development team reported on Thursday.

Initially expected on Wednesday, the fixes slid until today, with PHP builders mired in packaging and releasing the updates. "The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.5 and 5.2.17," the team said in a bulletin. "This release resolves a critical issue, reported as PHP bug #53632, where conversions from string to double might cause the PHP interpreter to hang on systems using x87 FPU registers.

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"The problem is known to only affect x86 32-bit PHP processes, regardless of whether the system hosting PHP is 32-bit or 64-bit. You can test whether your system is affected by running this script from command line," the team said.

The team "strongly advised" all users of PHP to update to these versions "immediately." Updates are available at the PHP.net website.

The bug was reported earlier this week by Rick Regan in the Exploring Binary blog.

Zend Technologies, which sells PHP development tools, also sent a hotfix to mend the problem to Zend Server subscribers.